Today’s New York Times featured the “Top 10 Best Books of 2008.” At the top of the list: Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by none other than Skidmore professor/celebrity Steven “The Illusionist” Millhauser.

In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo­kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.”

An excerpt from his book is available on the Times’ website. Although this is just one of many appearances in the Times for Dr. Millhauser, be sure to congratulate him on his timeless work.